Three-strikes petition gets attention of 10 Downing Street

Even the UK Prime Minister agrees: terminating the Internet accounts of P2P …

In a sign of just how charged the debate over Internet disconnections has become, the UK Prime Minister's office has weighed in on the matter. "We will not terminate the accounts of infringers," said a statement from 10 Downing Street. "It is very hard to see how this could be deemed proportionate except in the most extreme—and therefore probably criminal—cases."

Still, the UK government remains open to "account suspensions." Is it a distinction without a difference?

Petitions sometimes get responses

The statement came in response to a public petition on the graduated response provisions currently written into the Digital Economy bill being debated in Parliament. The bill would, for the first time, force UK ISPs to forward warning letters to P2P users and eventually take "technical measures" against them.

The petition complained that the bill forces ISPs to "monitor internet usage to ensure that no copyrighted material is being transferred. This flagrant disregard for privacy is comparable to forcing the Post Office to search through parcels for photocopied documents or mixtape cassettes. Such requirements would place enormous strain on ISP's whilst failing to prevent the distribution of copyrighted material through hidden IP’s, http or ftp," it said.

It also complained about the severity of cutting off Internet access. "Who is punished in the case of shared family connections?" it asked. "The increasing role of the internet in access to society should not be underestimated. Cutting off households deprives families of education, government services and freedom of speech. We do not see this as a fitting punishment, nor do we believe the breaches in privacy involved to be justifiable under copyright law."

As to the first complaint, it's simply wrong—the bill does not call on ISPs to monitor subscribers (it's left up to the rightsholders to do any monitoring and to issue complaints). Since rightsholders don't have access to the actual ISP network, they tend to gather their data from public sources like BitTorrent trackers. Wiretap laws (and EU law) would make any ISP network monitoring problematic and probably illegal; even the much-reviled, drafted-in-secret ACTA document would prevent any signatory form imposing ISP filtering requirements.

But as to the second point about proportionality, the petition touches on an important issue, and No. 10 appears to agree: account termination would be disproportionate to the harm. (The Prime Minister's office did reject the petition's main request, though, which was to eliminate graduated response.)

That stands in sharp contrast to the government of France, which has been an enthusiastic backer of a scheme to cut off repeat infringers and place them on a national black list to prevent them from signing up with another ISP.

Still, the UK does support "account suspensions." This would appear to have the same practical effect as account termination, though users could switch to another ISP and start new service with them.

The Open Rights Group complains that this is mere semantic quibbling. "Please do not be confused by the government’s semantics," wrote the group's director, Jim Killock. "[The government] decided in the summer that they would not refer to 'disconnecting' users, because that sounds harsh and over the top. 'Temporary account suspension' sounds much more reasonable.

"Language matters. What journalist is going to run a story on ‘temporary account suspension’ (yawn)? This is why the government has chosen these disingenuous terms: it‘s just more spin. What we still don’t know is how long a family’s internet might be disconnected for."

Wordplay or not, the response from 10 Downing Street does show something important: the public is aware of proportionality concerns, and even the government has taken "account termination" language off the table. At least in the UK, the cry "we must protect the artists!" can't be used to justify every possible response. Proportionality matters.